Akoya Publishing – serie

‘Where there is money, there will be sex.’Anthropologist Sine Plambech has dedicated her life to pursuing the trail of sex and money across continents.In Global Sex, she draws back the curtain on a hidden world, sharing intimate conversations with sex workers from Nigeria and Thailand living in Europe. And when she retraces the treacherous routes that led them from their families, she finds lives transformed by the money that absent mothers, daughters, wives and sisters send home.Plambech is unsparing in her analysis of the international sex trade, yet compassionate in her treatment of the women who work in it. It is these women who take centre stage, reminding us that behind every statistic, there is a human story.

DO YOU GLOW IN THE DARK?In Liliana Colanzi’s singular collection of short stories, set in a Latin America at once real and otherworldly, human vice contaminates every page. Amid eerie near-future landscapes, in communities both ordinary and uncanny, and during the very real fallout of a nuclear disaster, Colanzi’s characters must contend with a poisoned legacy.Unpredictable and vivid, You Glow in the Dark radiates in the reader’s mind long after the final page and announces a daring new voice in fiction.

‘I’m going to tell you what happened to me and what didn’t happen to me. The possibility that nothing happened to me is what's giving me the shakes.’Marta believes she is dying. With the onset of menopause, the changes to her body are stirring up new anxieties. Every time she feels a pain in her chest, a numbness in her arm, or a tension in her clavicle, she assumes she has cancer, or some other diagnosis she has yet to learn of.During a flight, she starts to experience a pain underneath her rib. Unsure whether the pain signals the ominous approach of death or a simple bout of flatulence, Marta descends into an examination of pain’s impact upon her life. Is her body failing her or is she failing her body?From one of Spain’s most widely read and acclaimed authors, My Clavicle And Other Massive Misalignments is a provocative and vulnerable semi-autobiographical novel rendering a memorable portrait of pain, health anxiety and menopause.

I’M FRIGHTENED OF MY DREAMS, OF EVERYTHING I DON’T KNOW, BUT ALSO OF EVERYTHING I KNOW. Marisol’s country is collapsing. A military coup sends the five-year-old and her family fleeing into the night. They seek shelter in a refugee camp where her parents try to protect her from danger while they await asylum.Marisol spends her adult life trying to cope with the memories from her childhood, the aunts and uncles she left behind, the friends whose names she no longer recalls. But when her boyfriend wants to learn more about her past, she finds herself confronting the trauma that haunts her.Chiquitita is a tender novel about flight and exile, the passing of time, and the experiences that remain with us, refusing erasure.

‘My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabiting it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.’A young woman and her mother spend a day at the beach. Soon the woman is in labour, three months early. At the hospital she slips from the glare of the lights toward the deep shadows of her own childhood, while doctors and nurses fight to keep her and her baby alive.Moving with dreamlike intensity between a heart-breaking past and a heart-stopping present, this fearless novel asks: in longing for a child do we also long to break free of a mother? And what was it that happened exactly, that day at the beach?